Further Updates On Post-Tsumami Japan 369
DarkStarZumaBeach points out a frequently updated page from the International Atomic Energy Agency with updates on the situation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, which reports in terse but readable form details of the dangers and progress there. The most recent update says that the plant's Unit 2 has been re-wired for power, and engineers 'plan to reconnect power to unit 2 once the spraying of water on the unit 3 reactor building is completed.' Read on for more on the tsunami aftermath.
Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous." dooms13 suggests (by way of The Register) that the disaster in Fukushima is nonetheless a demonstrated triumph for nuclear safety: "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive."
Something to contemplate while the rescue effort continues: imscarr writes "The coastline of Japan has drastically changed since the earthquake & tsunami. New bays have formed and many areas are completely flooded. These interactive before-and-after images show you the magnitude of devastation. Other photos here."
Adds reader madcarrots: "The Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB), a unit of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), directed by Professor Michel Andre, has recorded the sound of the earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, March 11. The recording, now available online, was provided by a network of underwater observatories belonging to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and located on either side of the earthquake epicenter, close to the Japanese island of Hatsushima."
Misleading in the extreme (Score:5, Informative)
Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous."
The linked source does NOT validate that assertion whatsoever. [nytimes.com] The 'plume' is a forecast of the way a plume would take shape across the pacific, if it were to exist. No-one is saying that there is a radioactive smoke plume of any magnitude, including undetectable. It is a weather forecast, meant for internal consumption by various national nuclear agencies for contingency planning and leaked to the NYT, nothing more.
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The media has been nothing than a huge cluster fuck of hyperbole and made up speculation under the guise of "experts".
Re:Misleading in the extreme (Score:5, Insightful)
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So weather forecasts are automatically NOT predictive? I understand weather pattern estimates don't always pan out, but they are generally more accurate than not. What point are you trying to make, other than just being needlessly contrarian?
I can't believe this AC post was modded up and the GP modded down. Fridaynightsmoke is making an important clarification from TFA (and even TFA doesn't emphasize this point nearly enough): there is no plume. The prediction is based on the hypothetical situation of a constant emission from nuclear plants in Japan, simply predicting where that radioactive material would travel. He's not questioning the weather prediction at all. He's pointing out that the report says, "If there were a worst case scenario
Shutting down nuke plants is a bit foolish (Score:4, Informative)
From New York to Germany, politicians are proposing shutting-down nuclear plants.
Talk about jumping to rash conclusions. What are we supposed to use for power once the oil/coal becomes scarce and as expensive as silver? We need nuclear power as a replacement fuel (and supplemented by solar).
Re:Shutting down nuke plants is a bit foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep,
I clicked on a CNN video of the explosion at the plant, and was conveniently served an ad about "Safe, Clean, Coal"
I nearly retched.
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Yes, let's move to safe, clean, non-radioactive coal... wait a second...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste [scientificamerican.com]
Re:Shutting down nuke plants is a bit foolish (Score:4, Informative)
Welcome to media hype and the anti-nuclear nuts run amok. By the way, next time they trot out the "experts", jot down the names and do a search. You'll find most of them are linked to anti-nuclear groups.
Not running amok (Score:3, Funny)
Welcome to media hype and the anti-nuclear nuts run amok.
They are not running amok so much as running away from the industry shills and misguided nuclear enthusiasts, who, when each new batch of egg hits their face, remind us that raw egg can be very good for the skin.
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This isn't flamebait, it's incredibly accurate. It isn't specific to anti-nuclear groups but people that want to control others via fear. You know "BEWARE OF NUCLEAR FALLOUT IMMINENT!" etc etc.
For real news read here - http://mitnse.com/ [mitnse.com] - ,where, everything is calming down.
Re:Shutting down nuke plants is a bit foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, MIT, which brought us the widely quoted "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors" blog post early on. What's that? You can't find "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors?" Oh, it seems mitnse.com has taken that highly rosy, bright and shiny optimistic tract down. Probably because the disaster that it dismissed has slowly happened. You can read that original post with a little googling. Pay close attention to the "worst-case-scenario" at the end.
Forgive me if I don't automatically accept the rosy outlook of people who are going to college to build and run nuclear plants.
Has there been breathless overreaction? Absolutely! I still hear crap on the news that makes me facepalm. But at the same time, TEPCO has consistently downplayed the real situation. other actual experts are considerably more worried about the ability of TEPCO to get a handle on this.
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Re:Shutting down nuke plants is a bit foolish (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, MIT, which brought us the widely quoted "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors" blog post early on. What's that? You can't find "why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors?" Oh, it seems mitnse.com has taken that highly rosy, bright and shiny optimistic tract down.
You mean this post?
http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/modified-version-of-original-post/ [mitnse.com]
Still seems to be there. (The original was posted at the blog mortagesatlarge since it was an email to freinds and family - it moved to the MIT blog since the original author found ou it had been publically posted, and asked them to check it for accuracy and if they would be willing to host it)
Probably because the disaster that it dismissed has slowly happened. You can read that original post with a little googling. Pay close attention to the "worst-case-scenario" at the end.
I've read it, the worst case scenario was with respect to the reactors. The problems we are seeing, which was not discussed in the original post (and at the time of the articles writing were not known to be an issue), are with the cooling beds for spent fuel, not the reactors.
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Wish I had some mod points left for you.
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Actually I'd say anti-nuke, is much closer to = pro stone age humans.
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>>>oil/coal becomes scarce and as expensive as silver?
That would be ~$160,000 per barrel. I suppose oil will never reach that high.
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That would be ~$160,000 per barrel. I suppose oil will never reach that high.
Fight enough wars for it and it will.
Nope. Because you can synthesize it from a lot of other stuff far cheaper than that. (Proven sources include garbage, sewage, and crop waste.) Potential replacements become more numerous if you're replacing the various refined products piecemeal rather than replacing the crude oil feedstock itself.
Oil is used because it's CHEAPER than the alternatives. Once it gets more expensive the usage
Re:Shutting down nuke plants is a bit foolish (Score:5, Insightful)
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On the upside, the anti-nuke environmental wackos are having a fucking field day. Nothing beats some good Chicken Little scare tactics and a convenient radiation boogeyman to advance your hippie agenda.
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are you saying there is nothing wrong with nuclear power ? are you saying absolute safety is even physically possible ?
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Absolute safety is, of course, impossible. But relative safety is.
I just wonder, though, whether humans can be trusted to operate nuclear plants safely. We don't have a good track record. Everywhere there's sufficient information we find critical information being hidden from the people who are supposed to ensure that things are safe for the economic benefit of plant management. In the US we have known unsafe plants being re-licensed after their design life is over to be operated at higher levels of pow
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Stupid move. Any nuke plant you shut down will have to be maintained as though it's running while you wait for a decade or more for the fuel to be unreactive enough to be transported off-site. You might as well make money on the electricity it can generate while that's happening, and you would be better off retrofitting it with a gravity-fed flooding mechanism with an inlet a long distance away and behind significant shielding.
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And when the earthquake cracks the inlet tube and all the water dumps before the reactor?
Nothing is ever fullproof. You do the best you can with the money you have and the ideas/plans available.
Personally I'm more impressed the facility came throught he quake unscathed, and ironically it's the lack of power thats the problem.
So, how can a nuclear power plant not have power when a reaction is still occuring, thats the thing thats confused me here. It's a power plant, and yet the cooling pumps are powered exc
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You? You'll be jacked into port 12B888 on pylon zed-zed-plural-zed-alpha. 200 watts of continuous thermal output as long as we have enough beer and donuts in intravenous form.
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interesting. I double-replied to the same post without noticing. I need to get into the lab and clear this shit out of my brain for the rest of the day.
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astroturf in action (Score:5, Interesting)
Bad Oehmen: Confirmation Bias, Sources & Astroturfing [ritholtz.com]
Describes the curious case of how a reassuring first time web post ("Why I am not worried about Japans nuclear reactors") from a guy working on a liason project at MIT in a non-nuclear engineering or physicist role somehow got reposted 30,000 times in one day.
Just something to keep in mind when you see crap like "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then". Hey clueless, the cores haven't melted. Yet. They are losing their heat removal capacity over time as less and less water surrounds them. When they do get hot enough, they will melt their containers, and we will have a chernobyl-style release. Not exactly the same as chernobyl, because there's no graphite to burn. Instead the particulate radioactive isotopes and actinides (and plutonium, yay!) will be propelled into the atmosphere via hydrogren explosions. There's also a hell of a lot more uranium and plutonium on site since some clever laddie beancounter got the used fuel rods containment pools located above the reactors.
Fukushima hasn't completely melted down, yet. If it doesn't it will because we (the planet) threw everything we have at it.
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Coupled with the ongoing debacle with the plant in Japan, stories like this really make me wonder if I ever should have changed my position on nuclear power.
A few years ago [slashdot.org], my views on nuclear energy began to shift. Part of this was due to "self-education" on nuclear power, and finding out from many online sources that nuclear energy was "totally safe", and that the dangers were "overblown", and that the public was simply being irrational and hysterical.
But over the last few days, watching the reactors in
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Indeed. Do you want another example of confirmation bias and astroturfing? Have you ever heard of Banqiao? It was a Chinese nuclear plant which in 1975 suffered a severe accident. The Chi
Re:astroturf in action (Score:5, Insightful)
Your entire spiel on Banqiao is an elaborate straw man. China has been subject to catastrophic floods for millennia. It has a lot to do with geography, but basically China is flat as a pancake and its major rivers have enormous watersheds. The dam is only part of the problem.
Meanwhile. devastating as the floods were, the waters receeded(Floods do not make regions uninhabitable). The dam was rebuilt and people's homes can also be rebuilt. Chernobyl on the other hand is a write off for up to 100 years. The Fukushima plant disaster now risks making a 30km radius semicircle of land uninhabitable for decades in one of the most densely populated countries in the world.
Only nuclear power can inflict that kind of long term, irrecoverable damage in the event of an accident; Can and has, on more than one occasion.
Would you build one of these plants within 30km of a major city like Tokyo, London or New York? Will you take the risk that the plant will operate smoothly and without incident for 100 years? Will you take the risk with 100-200 such plants near major cities worldwide? Are you prepared to write off one major metropolitan area every thirty years or so?
I'm not.
Nuclear energy lost its gloss for me after this incident. Nuclear engineers and particularly private companies cannot be relied upon to keep hot rods cool in an emergency. When the chips are down, they are too likely to fail, and the potential long term damage is simply too much to risk.
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I don't know if you're a believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming or not. If you are, I should point out that coal-burning plants could make Florida, Louisiana, and most of the country of Bangladesh underwater for several hundred thousand years.
Re:astroturf in action (Score:5, Insightful)
Floods don't. Hydroelectric dams do [wikipedia.org]. In fact, quite a few more people are relocated for dams [nationalgeographic.com] than from Chernobyl.
No. But neither would I build a large hydroelectric dam upriver from them. Nor a coal plant upwind from them. All of these plants are very safe, but there's no sense taking that risk if there's lots of open space in a relatively uninhabited area where you can put the plant.
We already do far more than that. Coal plant emissions are estimated to kill about 1 million people each year worldwide. Yeah all those deaths are distributed around the world. But 30 million deaths every 30 years would easily exceeds a major metropolitan area.
I wanted to address this last because you're introducing another variable (a good one) into the comparison. Mainly, the presence of the hydroelectric dams cannot be compared against a vacuum where nobody dies. If the dams were not there, those regions of China would experience more annual flooding. Sure, the Banqiao dam failure resulted in a huge number of deaths that fateful day, but we have to also take into account the number of lives saved by the presence of those dams in other years.
The net effect could be that having the dam actually resulted in a net savings of life. If flooding normally caused 8000 deaths in the region per year, and the dams stopped that for 24 years, then it saved a total of 192,000 lives. 171,000 lives were lost when the Banqiao dam burst. So over those 24 years, there would've actually been a net benefit of 21,000 lives saved.
But if you do that for hydro, you also have to do it for nuclear. You can't compare nuclear power to a vacuum where nobody dies. If nuclear power plants didn't exist, the need for the power they generate would still be there. Something else would have to provide that power. The most likely candidate is coal plants. Both are the constantly on type of power generation referred to as base load (oil, gas, and hydro plants are usually used to adjust for variability in demand, solar and wind provide a negligible contribution to power generation). So if our currently existing nuclear plants had never been built, we'd most likely be using coal plants in their place.
Statistically, coal plants cause about 161 deaths per TWh of power generated. Worldwide, nuclear power generates about 2500 TWh per year [world-nuclear-news.org]. Its average fatality rate has bee 0.04 deaths per TWh. So if all our nuclear plants had never been built, and were coal plants instead, we'd be looking at (161-0.04)*2500 = 402,400 more deaths per year from the additional coal mining and pollution.
In other words, if we analyze safety the way you're proposing, nuclear power saves 400,000 lives each year.
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I think we're mostly in agreement as far as what is happening on the ground at Fukushima. There are genuinely different degrees of meltdown, that somewhat map to the higher numbers of the 1-7 scale.
What I am trying to address is the non-sensical prattle about how it can't/won't be as bad as Chernobyl because there's no graphite and the reactor didn't explode. Hydrogen explosions from oxidized zirconium (and oxidized uranium at the next "bad shit happens" temperature threshold) will work just fine to creat
MIT Nuclear Engineering Department's assessment (Score:4, Informative)
The MIT Department of Nuclear Engineering has a web site, updated regularly, which acts as a hub for information about the nuclear crisis, including helpful background information.
See it at: http://mitnse.com/ [mitnse.com]
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Not sure what their priorities are. (Score:3)
It's taken them nearly a week to get a police truck with a water cannon there (and it didn't work).
Why the fuck wasn't there a way to fly in a pumper truck, a generator, a long hose, and a ladder, to flood that building on Saturday or Sunday?
Are they so married to their procedures that they have no clue at all when thinking outside the box will save their asses? Do they have no foresight to try something preventive instead of waiting for the same sequence of disastrous results to occur in every reactor building?
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Why the fuck wasn't there a way to fly in a pumper truck, a generator, a long hose, and a ladder, to flood that building on Saturday or Sunday?
You go ahead and run it.... The problem is that closeup you're dealing with enough radiation to kill a human in minutes. Even if you were brave enough to drive the truck there, you might not survive long enough to get out, pick up the large, heavy hose, hurk it up several flights of non existent stairs, bolt it down and turn it on. I'm a bit surprised that we don't see any robotics at least trying to get close. Possibly the thermal and radiation environment precludes anything not specifically designed
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Re:Not sure what their priorities are. (Score:5, Interesting)
They tried it at Chernobyl, the radioactivity fries the electronics very fast, making it impractical at best and impossible at worst to use robots.
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It's not the EMP. Hard radiation destroys semiconductors built from silicon. Possibly even those built from gallium-arsenide. You might need to go back to vacuum tubes.
EMP is hard on magnetics, which radiation isn't, particularly. (At least it didn't used to be. By now the domains might be small enough that those are damaged, also.) Chips, however, are damaged by hard radiation. They ruin the charge distribution, cut small traces, change the ionization levels, etc. Also even interfere with the dopin
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Maybe they were distracted cause of 10,000+ people killed, 300,000+ homeless in freezing temps, no power anywhere, fires burning, streets blocked 5 miles inland, yadayadayada.
BTW, onsite radiation is measured in the 100s of millisieverts/hr. You want to by the guy manning that hose? Also, the volume of water put out by a high pressure firehose compared with what is needed to cool 3 reactors and refill 4 reactors' spent fuel ponds is kind of like trying to fill your backyard swimming pool by pissing in it.
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Contrary to popular science fiction, electronics and radiation don't mix well.
The robots they tried to use at Chernobyl stopped working almost immediately.
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In case you've missed it, the area was hit by the largest earthquake in recent history and a 30ft tsunami.
It might not be as easy as going to the corner shop to get that equipment in there with all the surrounding land in ruins and 11.000 people dead or missing.
Re:Not sure what their priorities are. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fly it in using what exactly? A pumper truck weighs in at 20+ tonnes. There's no helicopter that will lift that much. Not the Tarhe (9T), not the Chinook (12.7T), not even the Super Stallion (14.5T).
New inlets, loss of sand (Score:3, Interesting)
The most impressive thing to me is the creation of new inlets, and the loss of sand. I wonder how long (if ever) before the sand bars will reform.
BTW, they landed a plane [af.mil] at Sendai Airport. I imagine it will be a long time before normal operations are established there though. AFAIK, those military transports can take off and land on anything that's flat and not too muddy.
Evac (Score:3)
I found out that American schooled people are being evacuated, and that all of the "Military kids" of the higher echelons have already been moved out of the area.
Of course, these could just be rumors, but one guy was pretty convinced he was being evacuated today.
Spent fuel stored on site? (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?
In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility. Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.
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As far as I know, transporting spent fuel rods is hazardous and therefore very expensive. They therefore make things cheaper by storing them on-site.
Re:Spent fuel stored on site? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Why not reprocess them so that they can be reused.
Oh ya, I forgot. That got banned
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing#History [wikipedia.org]
F'n genius!
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Fukushima 1 reactor 3 was running on fuel that was reprocessed in France.
Re:Spent fuel stored on site? (Score:4, Informative)
President Reagan lifted the ban in 1981, but did not provide the substantial subsidy that would have been necessary to start up commercial reprocessing.
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A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?
Because that's where you have the safety measures already installed to store nuclear fuel and waste.
In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility.
Short of being hit by a magnitude 9+ earthquake followed by a 30ft tsunami, power shouldn't go out.
Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.
The reactor facility was designed to withstand a magnitude 8.4 earthquake. There exists areas specifically designed to handle storage of spent fuel rods within the facility. In short, the spent fuel rods are already in the safest place they can be.
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No you idiot, the message is that the spent fuel rods are in a purpose-built area specifically designed to hold them while they cool down enough to move them somewhere else. There's simply no better place to put them while they cool down than inside a nuclear plant, in actively cooled pools built specifically to hold spent fuel rods.
Nuclear power is - even with this accident still ongoing - still the safest form of power generation we have.
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A lot of comments here seem to focus on what could have been done differently. Obviously, hindsight is 20/20. That being said, I have a question that I haven't seen asked or answered yet. Why are the spent fuel rods stored in the same buildings as the reactors?
In the event of losing power, not only do the active rods need to be dealt with, but the spent rods have to be monitored and maintained in the same facility. Wouldn't transporting the spent rods to a less densely populated area that was specifically designed to handle their storage make more sense? It seems that the problems right now getting the reactors under control is being hampered by the severe risks of those containment pools for the spent rods draining.
Precisely because spent rods need to be monitored and maintained, and at a nuclear power plant you already have the technology, expertise, and security in place because you have to for the reactor itself. If you have a remote facility for disposal you need to duplicate a lot of effort, and you have to figure out a secure and safe way to transport highly radioactive materials from the plant to the facility. A truck/train accident involving spent fuel rods would be a Big Deal because it'd be very likely to
Port Royal Jamaica Analogs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Port Royal, Jamaica had a huge earthquake in 1692 pretty much dropping a fair portion of that city under the ocean. It is still there, flooded and under water. Protected as a historical site, divers frequently dive on it. In some places entire buildings are still there, intact as if they were built under the water.. The reason I'm asking is, has the land that is flooded in Japan actually subsided to below sea level due to the earthquake, or is it simply still flooded? It looks to me as if most of the land in Japan that was affected is still at the same height above sea level as pre-quake, however there may be areas that are now below the ocean... in any event Port Royal was pretty much destroyed again in 1909, and has been hit and hit hard by Hurricanes and probably is due for another temblor in 200 odd years.... I sure hope they don't build a nuke plant there, and I hope that Japan and every other country planning a new nuclear plant try their hardest to site them in areas that
(A): Don't have a history of earthquakes.
and
(B) don't have a history of storm surges from Hurricanes/Cyclones/Tsunami's...
This is all bullshit and PR (Score:3)
The plans to "rewire" the power plants were from yesterday and, at the moment, they are just that, plans. This morning Toden announced that the construction of the electric cable that was supposed to be complete yesterday will be delayed until at least tomorrow. At the very end, they said also, in a markedly small voice, that they hope restoring the electricity will go smoothly, but there are worries that the equipment on the ground - pumps and transformers - may be out of order (maybe - after those explosions and all that water dumped on them from the air?), and that could probably hamper the effort.
In reality, there is no staff (except the firefighters, Chernobyl style) on the ground since Saturday - a relative and a former colleague worked at the plant and are already in Osaka since Tuesday - all measurements are taking place from the helos and from an observation points 30km away, and radiation in excess of 150 microgreys is being reported 30-40 km away upwind from the reactor by the local authorities.
So, there is only stalling, spinning, and no information.
Incidentally, here are the radiation reports by the ministry of science and bullshit (japanese, sorry, all data is in microsieverts, and if the last column is without dates, it has the long-term averages) : http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/saigaijohou/syousai/1303723.htm [mext.go.jp]
Wusses (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone is panicking now and buying iodine tablets.
What a pack of pussies the world has become.
In the 1950s, people used to watch above ground atom bomb tests in between shows and gambling in Vegas while sipping martinis.
Our current president had to be roused from his busy schedule of vacation or golf or whatever to make a comment. Former President Teddy Roosevelt once killed a Kodiak bear with his mind, and personally dug the final mile of the Panama Canal.
Send in Chuck Norris in a lead apron. He'll kill the fuel rods with one punch.
One of the five basic tsu-tastes (Score:4, Funny)
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It means a snack you have with drinks. Japan went out drinking last night, apparently.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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I know enough not to build a nuclear plant on a tsunami prone coast that can't be protected by walls.
Re:Don't be too proud (Score:5, Insightful)
I know enough not to build a nuclear plant on a tsunami prone coast that can't be protected by walls.
If only you were there 40 years ago when this reactor was installed to warn them of the dangers... maybe you could have told them to use a more modern design that doesn't require active cooling to remain safe. Maybe you already have a map showing them exactly where to site the reactors? Or do you have a viable alternative to nuclear in your back pocket?
Lots of people can use hindsight to show exactly what went wrong in *this* particular incident, but who can tell where the next natural disaster will strike and how it will manifest itself? Did you already tell California to shut down its two coastal nukes? And it's not like nukes are the only power generating hazard out there - TVA was lucky that the billions of gallons of fly ash discharge didn't kill anyone.
USA officials seem to have a lot of criticism for the Japanese and how they handled this incident, but truth be told, this reactor survived a quake 30 times larger than it was designed for and so far hasn't spun out of control into a large scale disaster. If they hadn't lost power it's likely that this would have been a very minor incident. If the USA wants to criticize, then they need look no further than their own backyard. In California their 2 coastal nuclear plants are designed for a 7.0 or 7.5 earthquake but there's a very good chance that California will have a larger quake in the next 30 years. Oh, and at one of them, they installed the seismic reinforcements backwards [wikipedia.org] and at the other, the entire reactor was installed backwards [wikipedia.org]. Oops.
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Do you know how often tsunamis larger than five meters hit the coast of Japan? Anyone who lives there could tell you the last time a tsunami this size or larger hit, a ten meter tsunami hit Okushiri in 1993, and before that, another ten meter tsunami hit Wajima in 1983. I'm not criticizing Japan, per se, I am criticizing the cost cutting tendencies of the nuclear industry, which could have a perfect safety record if they cared to.
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Aiming for a perfect safety record, or in general setting the bar too high, just causes people to game the system (just look at the games that go on with Japan's homicide police given the expectation of 90%+ solution rates for murders). Aiming for safe failure modes makes much more sense, and this plant was quite reasonable in that regard.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three [wikipedia.org]
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Nothing has a perfect saftey record. ever. The longer something is around the more likely problems will develop. Here they were hit not only a major quake which as saftey indicates they shut down for, but then got hit by a wave of water strong enough to move a cargo ship miles in shore.
No wall would have stopped that, as the wave would go around, the wall and then flood back into the wall still destroying the generators. That's if the wall wasn't knocked down on top of said generators by the shear force
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Then don't build it on the coast! And listen when your engineers tell you it isn't safe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Three [wikipedia.org]
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In California their 2 coastal nuclear plants are designed for a 7.0 or 7.5 earthquake but there's a very good chance that California will have a larger quake in the next 30 years.
Not with our horizontal slip faults. The biggies come from the subduction zones, and the nearest stretches from Northern California up to British Columbia. And the plants were designed for 7.0 quakes *directly* underneath, and there's no faults directly under them.
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Face it, they cut corners to make more of a profit. And talk about stupid, tsunamis happen all the time in Japan, this was built "after the fact." Are you seriously surprised that there was a tsunami of this size in Japan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_tsunamis [wikipedia.org]
Face it, tsunami heights top five meters almost all the time.
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Cutting corners to up profits isn't really a big part of Japanese culture, especially 40 years ago with anything having to do with nuclear safety. Your accusations are as insulting as they are unfounded.
This was a worst-reasonable-case external hazard for a nuclear reactor, and it held up quite well. Much like Three Mile Island, there doesn't seem to be much harm done here, aside from the economic value of the plant itself. This whole CNN-fueled panic over a non-crisis is a sad diversion away from the re
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Cutting corners to up profit
THAT is bean-counter territory. every color and nationality has them; and the engineers take shit.
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You do know this plant was built by GE, right? And that three engineers [wikipedia.org] quite in protest over the unsafe design? Excuse me if I'm not concerned about insulting an American megacorporation.
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In other words, GE tried to sweeten the price and TEPCO bought into it. It's OK to disparage TEPCO too btw.
ENOUGH! I'm tired of all you naysayers! (Score:3)
Yeah, sure, most of the problems were financial or political, not engineering. But we can fix those, too.
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them.
It sank into the swamp.
So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.
So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.
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But it's not "Japanese culture" that's building the nuclear plants. It's corporate culture. And "cutting corners" is part of the corporate DNA. They can't help themselves.
The people who are getting off planes from Japan in Dallas Fort Worth and Chicago's O'Hare airport and setting off the radiation detectors might disagree.
There are those who have decided that nothing will change their minds about nuclear energy
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I do think it might have been wise to keep the generators on high ground (or deep underground) in a coastal area prone to typhoons and tsunamis. Why they didn't do this is beyond me (seriously, who doesn't plan on a tsunami on the Japanese coast??).
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To be fair, 50 out of 1000 is still a 1 in 20 chance. You can't plan for everything though.
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And yet, in a region known for frequent ten meter tsunamis, the last one in 1993, they built the backup generator directly at sea level, on the coast, and designed it to withstand a five meter tsunami. Maybe because it was cheaper to do it that way. If you are the CEO who decides to do something like this, and people die, you will not face prosecution. But if you don't make your shareholders rich next quarter, you WILL be out of a job. It doesn't take genius insight into human nature to tell what will happe
Re:Don't be too proud (Score:4, Interesting)
1/1000 chance per year = .999 annualized chance of normal operation .999^(~436 reactors) = 1 in 3 annualized chance of meltdown somewhere in the world.
Clearly your numbers are off, but still, the point remains the same: when it comes to things with great potential for harm, you need a far higher standard than just 1:1000 chance of disaster. What's an acceptable rate of time for a 50% probability for an INES Cat. 6 event? 1:500 years? Each reactor would need to have an annualized INES Cat. 6 failure probability of 0.000317% (a 1 in 315,000 chance).
Great risk requires great caution.
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Except in this case there was no great harm, due to proper planning. When the dungheap hit the windmill, the failure mode was reasonably safe. Great risk comes from building a Chernobyl-style reactor. The best way to limit risk is to make the reactor fail as safely as possible, not arrogantly assume you can anticipate all the rare sources of risk and declare that you're not vulnerable to any of them!
There are modern designs that really take this to heart. While a "pebble bed" reactor perhaps isn't the i
Re:Don't be too proud (Score:4, Insightful)
How exactly do you think this failure mode is a desirable one? There are spent fuel ponds containing more fuel than in the core itself which are in various states of overheating, half of the buildings have been gutted of sensors, pumps, cranes, etc by hydrogen explosions, the core is cracked on the #2, god only knows what's happening in the common fuel pool, the radiation level has been high enough to drive away *helicopters flying high overhead* some days, etc. You call that "reasonably safe"? God forbid we get a recriticality in a spent fuel pool. The explosions left half of them sitting exposed to the air and full of debris.
This is an INES level 6 disaster, same as the Kyshtym disaster [wikipedia.org] that caused the Soviets to quietly have to remove 30 towns from their maps. The US has ordered a 50 mile exclusion zone for Americans around Fukushima Daiichi -- and the disaster is still unfolding. For comparison, it's under 40 miles from the reactors of Indian Point to Times Square, and far less to the outer reaches of NYC.
And, FYI, you're applying an observation bias to your "wrong thing at every decision point" argument. if they had done the right thing, you wouldn't have heard about it. There are nuclear accidents all the time. Nearly every reactor has had accidents of varying severity. Only the bigger ones (generally INES-5 and above) make the news. Naturally those are going to be the ones where more than one thing went wrong. And, FYI, both in Chernobyl and TMI, there were many *right* decisions made also. They simply didn't outweigh all of the wrong decisions. And many "wrong decisions" occur during the engineering stage, not the operation stage, but aren't known about until they reveal themselves many years later.
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thanks for the numbers.
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Do remember an earthquake of this magnitude is a 1 in 1000+ year event. It's not realistic to plan for those when the life of your reactor is 50 years...
so with 1000 reactors across the globe(442-6 in operation, 65 in construction), you can have one of these every year ?
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So tumble that through the ringer of planning and fundin
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t might not make sense to plan for 1000 year events
we DO when the radioactive crap will be here for thousands of years.
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The "radioactive crap" will be 90% gone within a few months.
Look at Chernobyl.
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What the hell are you burning without air to run this Stirling engine?
What do you plan on using as your source of cold?
The delta between the hot side and the cold is going to need to be fairly high to make that practical.
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You have just demonstrated that you do not understand the difference between a sterling engine and a steam turbine, so I will point you to Wikipedia, where you can remedy your lack of education.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_engine [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine [wikipedia.org]
Or perhaps you do not understand just how hot things remain when a reactor is shut down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decay_heat [wikipedia.org]
Hopefully that should be enough for you to understand why a sterling engine sized to run the emergency co
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It's not starting back up. Ever. If the salt water wasn't enough, the potassium borate that they were pumping in (remember the report of the US delivering "coolant"? boron is a neutron absorber, it's not normally in the cooling water, it's used when the cooling water isn't working, and it gums up the core) was. Those reactors are useless forever now.
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Those reactors are useless forever now.
If any didn't actually have something melt (and the water didn't have significant cobalt) they COULD be cleaned up and restarted. But it would be SO expensive that it's far cheaper to build new ones. (Post-apocalypse approval process and all...)